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“It brings what students are learning about alive; it’s a way of getting them to look at their writing and take it seriously,” says Beth Seetch, coordinator of the College Writing Program, speaking of the pedagogy behind her course Writing and Community Service.
The class is one of more than a dozen sections of a required College writing course (English 110) that is normally taken by sophomores in the fall and first-year students in the spring, complementing and extending their writing experience in their First-Year Seminar.
“I thought there was a place in the academic realm where students could use what they were learning in community service to write,” Seetch says. “I wanted them to think about writing in the public sector, in the non-profit sector, to think about the kinds of documents that people [in these arenas] have to write, and to understand that they don’t just write for a grade, but with a sense of purpose for what they want to accomplish.”
Seetch also wants to “get students to question this cliché they have about how they can’t wait to live in the real world,” she says. “I want them to see that the academy is the real world – that what we do here matters, and what happens in downtown Easton matters to them, and that there is more of a connection than they might see at first.”
Danielle Horowitz ’08 (Princeton Junction, N.J.) took the course this fall, performing her community service component at Third Street Alliance for Women and Children, a non-profit agency in Easton, Pa., that offers wellness and education programs for men, women, and children; childcare; shelter for homeless women and their children; and adult day services. Keeping a journal of her experiences at the agency provided a valuable outlet, she says.
“After I do service I always want to sit down and write,” Horowitz says. “There are so many conflicting thoughts and feelings about things I see.”
Other community service options included Kids in the Community, tutoring inmates at Northampton County prison, Art for the Young at Heart (working with patients at a local Alzheimer’s facility), and working with teenage mothers at Easton Area High School. All are among more than 25 sustained programs of voluntary service that Lafayette students conduct each year under the auspices of the College’s Landis Community Outreach Center.
Like Horowitz, Michael Favara ’08 (Holmdel, N.J.) had conducted many hours of community service prior to coming to Lafayette and sees community service as a “duty.” He took the course last spring as a first-year student, working with children in Easton’s public housing neighborhoods in the Kids in the Community program.
The “real world” problems he faced provided a valuable classroom.
“For one project, I made a code of conduct for the kids to follow, since things were unstructured,” he says. “I asked kids what they thought would be good rules to follow to enhance their time at KIC. Then I compiled them and wrote a report on what I had done and what I learned through the exercise.”
The course stresses writing as a process, with students spending time organizing, drafting, and revising, and conducting peer reviews before writing a final draft. While authoring journals taps into students’ emotional responses, writing reports gives them the opportunity to learn how to write in other genres, ones they will encounter in their professional endeavors. Other assignments included a rhetorical analysis of a newspaper op-ed piece, a letter to a targeted audience, a feature, and a commentary on a topic of interest. The diversity of projects teaches a pillar of sound writing: writing for an audience.
Favara, a pre-med student whose high school curriculum focused on sciences, admits he struggles with writing but says the class greatly improved his skills.
“I learned that writing is a big process I never knew existed, and that there are always ways to improve writing by drafting, editing, and peer review,” he says. “Professor Seetch always wanted us to understand who our audience was because that determined the tone of our writing.”
Writing was stressed in Horowitz’s high school experience, but she too says she improved her writing in Seetch’s class.
“I had basic writing skills, but hadn’t learned about writing structure and techniques. This class made me more focused,” she says. “The assignments got us thinking about the different audiences and the best vehicles in which to reach them. Now I think, ‘Why am I writing, what am I trying to achieve, what organization is best to achieve this?’”
For stories about other service-learning classes, visit Lafayette LIVE and choose Enhancing Learning, then Service Learning.